LESSONS LEARNED

County’s catastrophic wildfires in 2003 and 2007 led to significant changes
in coordination, communication and awareness that aided in recent firestorm

As bad as it was this past week, when unseasonable May Santa Ana winds, combined with high heat and low humidity, led to at least six major fires, it could have been far worse.

The fire catastrophes of the past decade taught this county — its officials and its residents — valuable lessons that saved properties and possibly lives this time around.

In October 2003, more than 2,400 homes were lost and 17 people were killed. In 2007, more than 1,400 homes burned and 10 people died.

The fire siege of May 2014, as terrifying and tragic as it was, resulted in only a couple dozen structures lost (losses have not been completely tallied) and possibly one death.

The way the fires were fought, the ways evacuations were ordered and the way information was dispensed — indeed the very way county residents have prepared themselves and their property — made a huge difference.

To be sure, the situations were different. And the severe drought this year has raised the risk of fires far earlier in the year than usual.

But the winds last week weren’t nearly as strong or sustained as during the firestorms of ’03 and ’07. Instead of hundreds of thousands of acres burning in blazes that spread into some urban areas from the backcountry, most were kept below 3,000 acres and were limited to brush-filled canyons, valleys and hills. Last week’s fires burned mainly in confined, populated areas with easy access, compared with remote areas where the blazes could grow into huge miles-long fronts before anything could be done.

Then there’s the weather.

“The most critical difference with this event,” Cal Fire Assistant Region Chief Thom Porter said on Thursday, “is that it is happening so early in the season with unseasonable fire weather.

“This is September/October kind of fire weather and in some respects we’re lucky it’s happening at this time of the year because the live-fuel moistures (the moisture in local vegetation) are up. It has reduced the intensity of the fires to what it would be in September under the same conditions.”

But he said having the fires burn in areas in the west side of the county presented its own challenges. They are heavily populated, and there’s a lot more valuable properties at risk.

There was also another key difference. When last decade’s fires hit the county, huge fires had already been burning in other parts of Southern California. Firefighters by the thousands had already been deployed to battle those blazes. So, at first, there weren’t enough resources available for San Diego County’s firefight.

This time, the county was the epicenter of fire, and resources came funneling to us.

Defensible space

A scene repeated over and again this past week: massive flames burning up a canyon or down a hillside toward homes that appeared to be in peril but in the end were saved and unscathed.

In many cases, officials said, it was the defensible space required by stronger laws enacted in the past decade (from 30-foot requirements to 100-foot requirements) that played the biggest part in stopping the advance. Fire would slow or halt as heavy brush gave way to bare dirt or ice plant.

Meanwhile, air tankers and helicopters would attack the most vulnerable areas from above as firefighters by the hundreds assigned to protect structures hosed down trees or fences burning near residences, and work crews cut brush near homes to starve the flames.

“That’s an amazing thing that has changed over the last 10 years. Within the past decade, we have an incredible mix of that defensible space and building code improvement that has saved many of these homes,” Porter said.

Dianne Jacob, chairwoman of the county Board of Supervisors, said all of the improvements on the governmental side are wonderful, but without each resident’s awareness it wouldn’t have mattered.

“Preparedness starts with each and every person,” she said. “Each individual has to take responsibility for their own space and be prepared to protect, as much as they can, their property and their families, and then all the agencies have to be prepared to do their part.

“I think people are a lot smarter now,” she said. “Hard lessons to learn. Two hard lessons — ’03 and ’07 — and I think that sticks in everyone’s minds.”

One small example from one of the lesser fires: a neighborhood that did not burn in the Highway fire, which charred about 380 acres by state Route 76 and Interstate 15. A senior community called Rancho Monserate, with 240 mobile homes, was the area most at risk early Wednesday afternoon as the mountains west of I-15 basically blew up in flames. The community is snuggled up against one of the hills that was aflame. But the buffer zone cleared between the homes and the mountain served as a shield, and its residents had practiced every month for years for such an eventuality. Phone calls were immediately placed to all, and deputies augmented the warning by driving through with loudspeakers.

“We have practiced and practiced,” said Bill Parkinson, 79, a member of the community’s Certified Emergency Response Team and a ham radio operator who was sending messages throughout the day as he patrolled the development in his golf cart. “People were alert and did exactly what they needed to do.”

Rancho Monserate was saved as firefighters were able to halt the fire’s progress down the mountain with just feet to spare.

Better teamwork

Throughout the week, public officials have praised the coordination and cooperation exhibited by the government during the fire siege.

“We’ve really come light-years from 2003 in working out evacuation plans, repopulation plans, working cooperatively with fire and police,” said county Sheriff Bill Gore. “It’s just been a great, great improvement over what we used to do.”

“Ten years ago we were still a very disjointed group of fire departments,” said Porter.

There were interagency conflicts, turf battles and technical communication issues.

Since then, interagency cooperation has become the norm.

“We are working hand and glove,” Porter said. “We know each others’ strength and weaknesses, and we are complementing each other.”

Federal red tape delayed the military helicopter response a bit, but thanks to an agreement between Cal Fire and the military that went into effect a couple of years ago, Marine helicopters were made available to fight fires off base on Thursday.

The heart of the fight was the county’s 10,000-square-foot Emergency Operations Center in Kearny Mesa — a place that existed more in theory than in reality a decade ago.

It was at that center where public officials and such private enterprises as San Diego Gas & Electric and the Red Cross coordinated the response and communications plan.

“Back in 2003, one of the chief complaints was about coordination,” said Holly Crawford, director of the county’s office of emergency services. “There were dueling news conferences on opposite ends of the county.”

“Mixed messages were being sent out,” Gore said. “This has been so much better coordination with county/city and all the regional assets being together.”

During the height of the recent fires, the Emergency Operations Center was packed with officials gathered in enclaves around their respective stations.

“There were agencies I’d never even heard of there,” Jacob said.

“It’s a lot easier to coordinate a regional disaster when you have all the players in the same place at the same time and the same table,” Crawford said.

“We didn’t have the benefit in 2003 of our mass notification system,” she added. “It was the old-fashioned way of getting the word out with deputies and officers knocking on doors and telling people to get out. Now we have this great technology, this mass notification system that we can literally draw a circle on a map and immediately initiate thousands of phone calls to homes to tell residents to evacuate.”

Crawford said San Diego was one of the first areas in the country to adopt such technology. Through the AlertSanDiego (formerly known as the Reverse 911 system), 176,901 evacuation calls were made to homes, businesses and cellphones between Tuesday and Friday.

And during previous fires there was great consternation from residents who had to wait days or even more than a week before being allowed back home.

“There were a lot of complaints from people wanting to get back into their neighborhoods,” Gore said. “Every one of my stations now in the county has a repopulation plan.”

Technological improvements

In some ways, how fires are fought hasn’t changed in many years, but advances in technology have made it more exact and safer.

“The act of fighting a fire has not changed,” Porter said. “It still takes boots on the ground, men and women with hand tools who cut a line around (a fire) and with bulldozers to put fires out. But technology helps with situational awareness and the safety element.”

Airplanes above the fires are now equipped with special high-tech cameras, their images linked to computers accessible by chiefs in their vehicles below.

“We’re able to see what the fire is doing through the smoke column and understand where we have firefighters in peril and get them out quickly,” Porter said.

Turning off power

Finally, the past week is also notable for what didn’t happen. There were no big fires in the backcountry. Maybe it was just luck. Maybe it was because SDG&E, which has constructed an advanced wind and weather station network throughout the county, turned off power to transmission lines in selected rural areas from Julian to Boulevard when the winds were strongest on Wednesday.

In 2007, three of the biggest fires were started by arcing power lines. Since then, much of the rural system has been strengthened. Some criticize the proactive power shut-offs because a lack of electricity can mean a lack of communication and even water for those with pumps.

Yet again, there were no fires out east, where they could have easily grown beyond control.